Originally posted on July 5, 2020

CNN had an interesting article written by Carl Bernstein. Of course, coming from CNN (dubbed the Communist Network News by Trump fans) it will no doubt dismissed as fake news. For the rest of us it offers yet one more window into Trump’s dysfunction – to the point where it “posed a danger to the national security of the United States.”

Bernstein claims to have interviewed a number of top Trump deputies, both “retired” and current. Some of them he identifies, others he doesn’t, for obvious reasons. We can only hope that some of those wishing to remain anonymous get the courage to come out publicly at some point before the election.

The focus of the article is the hundreds of phone calls Trump has had with foreign leaders, and how unprepared and self-centered he continues to be even after 3 years. Of course the transcriptions and even the summaries of these calls generally remain top secret. Again, we can only hope that at some point they’ll be made public. I’d love to see first-hand evidence of just how bad they are.

Bernstein’s first paragraph: “In hundreds of highly classified phone calls with foreign heads of state, President Donald Trump was so consistently unprepared for discussion of serious issues, so often outplayed in his conversations with powerful leaders like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkish President Recep Erdogan, and so abusive to leaders of America’s principal allies, that the calls helped convince some senior US officials — including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff — that the President himself posed a danger to the national security of the United States, according to White House and intelligence officials intimately familiar with the contents of the conversations”.